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Getting out of Vienna was much more difficult than I had imagined. I spent the morning, from about 8:30 to noon just manoeuvering my way through the inner city, then the suburbs, then the suburbs of the suburbs, then the exurbs till I was finally at a place where every single intersection didn't offer ten differing paths. However, while on my way out of the city, I happened upon this:
The Ferris Wheel from The Third Man! How exciting. Man, I love that movie.
It took forever to escape the city. For some reason it really got to me, and I was thoroughly perturbed by how I spent 3.5 hours going about 15 miles, completely blowing my entire day's schedule. Once out of Vienna, the landscape turned predictably beautiful. The day was spent winding my way through one of Austria's major agricultural centers, the Weinvertel. Tons of vineyards on top of many strawberries, grain, potato and pea fields. But it was also unrelentingly hot.
It is strawberry season around this area, so I stopped and asked a lady if I could have 10 strawberries. She said "10 kilos?" I said no, 10 strawberries. She looked perplexed, since there was a field of hundreds of thousands of berries and here was this sweaty, foreign man who wanted just 10 of them. But then she saw the bike and saw that I just wanted a snack, so she just gave them to me, and then grilled me about where I'd been and where I'm from in the States. Here's a photo I call "Still Life with Bicycle and Strawberries":
There were some other interesting things that day: I hit another Mile Zero milestone
I passed through a town that hangs all of it's extra socks on the edge of town
But it wasn't all fun and games. As is my wont, I was completely unprepared, moisture-wise. It gets harder to find places to top off your water bottles the more sparsely populated the area. By the end of the day, I saw myself as Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, flinging himself down sand dunes before slowly ascending the next one. The hills were endless and there was very little in the way of shade.
70 miles on a bunch of fairly hard riding and I managed to do it, albeit with some griping and moaning. I begain talking to constructs of Political Geography as if they were capable of listening: "God damn you Austria, are you making it difficult because you don't want me to leave?", "Holy Crap, Czech Republic, where are you already?!?!?!". Well, despite the difficulties and the thirst, I made it to the town of Valtice, just inside the Czech Republic.
What was odd was that immediately upon entering the new country, things definitely changed. People smiled back at me. I got a few waves. The lady at the guesthouse actually seemed happy to see me. This is in marked contrast to everywhere I went in Austria and Switzerland (and to a lesser extent, Germany) where everybody in the tourist industry acts like they're performing judge-mandated community service. Come to think of it, the tourists also look like they're performing community service as well. Very few people seemed truly joyful.
Anyway, I was thrilled to make it to another country, albeit exhausted, sweaty and a little on the ripe side.
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